MIDDLE EAST: On Two Camels at the Same Time

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To the young woman Israeli security guard at Ben-Gurion Airport, there was something suspicious about the Dutch tourist who called himself Hugo Muller. After he got off the plane, she separated Muller from the nine other passengers who had arrived in Tel Aviv from Vienna aboard Austrian Airlines Flight 712 and led him to a screened-off room for a baggage check. When Muller obeyed her request and opened the bag he was carrying, explosives inside it killed them both and wounded ten other people. After making inquiries in Europe, Israeli authorities concluded that "Muller" was a courier for Palestinian guerrillas. In Beirut, George Hasbash's militant Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine claimed responsibility for the bombing.

Quiet Day. Compared with other fedayeen terrorist acts in the past, the Ben-Gurion incident was relatively mild; four years ago in the same terminal, members of the Japanese Red Army, allied with the P.F.L.P., killed 28 people. Nevertheless, last week's explosion was one more bloody link in the Middle East's seemingly endless chain of anguish. Another and more important one is the civil war in Lebanon, where almost 20,000 people have been killed in nearly 14 months of inconclusive fighting. That conflict has reached the point where it is considered a quiet day in Beirut when only 30 people are killed. Among last week's victims: moderate Maronite Leader Raymond Edde, 63, who was wounded by gunmen chasing his car, and Linda Atrash, 55, sister of Leftist Leader Kamal Jumblatt, who was slain when assassins seeking relatives of Jumblatt burst into her apartment.

The war grinds on despite all efforts to stop it. The latest proposal was in some ways the most impractical: before flying back to Paris from a U.S. visit, French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing offered to airlift French troops to act as a peace-keeping force. The proposal was rejected out of hand by Lebanese Moslems and the Palestinians. At least one knowledgeable observer suggested last week that the U.S. might have contributed to the impasse: L. Dean Brown, a special envoy sent by Washington to seek an armistice in Lebanon, told the New York Times that the fighting had probably been prolonged there because the U.S.—fearful of Israel's response—had discouraged Syria from moving in an army large enough to control the warring factions.

Amid such bloodshed and bitterness, there have been a few hopeful signs. Last week both Israel and Syria agreed to extend for another six months the mandate of the United Nations peace-keeping forces on the Golan Heights. The agreement by Jerusalem and Damascus was as much to avoid the consequences of no mandate—the prospect of renewed fighting—as it was a vote of approval for the U.N. troops.

The Middle East in fact is once again in a no-war, no-peace stalemate and is likely to remain so for some time. That situation could be particularly dangerous for the U.S., with its enlarged commitments and interests in the area. So concluded TIME'S Middle East bureau chiefs—Wilton Wynn of Cairo, Karsten Prager of Beirut and Donald Neff of Jerusalem—after comparing notes and impressions on the neutral ground of Athens. Their collective estimate of the situation: